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The heat maps of eye movement were fascinating...I noticed the almost complete lack of activity on the advertisements immediately. Users appear to do what I do,

The heat maps of eye movement were fascinating...I noticed the almost complete lack of activity on the advertisements immediately. Users appear to do what I do, just simply ignore them or try and filter them out.

ams6110 17y ago
What I noticed was that most of the attention was between the left side and center of the page. The only attention point on the right side was the scroll bar. Made me think of the NEXTSTEP window manager where the scroll bars were on the left. The explanation at the time for this apparent deviation from the "standard" was that it kept the scroll bar closer to the user's primary attention areas on the page. In Mac OS X i guess Apple caved to popular convention and moved the scroll bars to the right.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I wonder why only a particular part of the scroll bar appears to have attracted long gaze patterns? In my own case, I'm typically looking at the slider as a metric of page length, not a particular spot on the bar itself.
  - gambling8nt 17y ago
    I noticed that as well; I assume people basically all tended to check page length at the same point through the page--presumably at some boundary between content sections.
ahoyhere 17y ago
It's called "ad blindness," a well-known problem. That's why I don't even bother to put ads on my sites. People also ignore anything in colored blocks, or that looks like an ad. Thus ReCaptcha had a huge problem initially with people just "not seeing" it on the forms where it was placed. It looked like an ad.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing similar research on Google's page, with their distinct take on ad selection, format and placement. It appears that people unconsciously set an "attention getting threshold", things that are designed to attract attention go above that threshold and are simply ignored. This seems to be well known hence the various forms of pop-up and pop-over ads that are showing up on sites again now even though they were proven to annoy users to the point of having to derive engineering solutions to the problem.

ams6110 17y ago

What I noticed was that most of the attention was between the left side and center of the page. The only attention point on the right side was the scroll bar. Made me think of the NEXTSTEP window manager where the scroll bars were on the left. The explanation at the time for this apparent deviation from the "standard" was that it kept the scroll bar closer to the user's primary attention areas on the page. In Mac OS X i guess Apple caved to popular convention and moved the scroll bars to the right.

elblanco 17y ago
I wonder why only a particular part of the scroll bar appears to have attracted long gaze patterns? In my own case, I'm typically looking at the slider as a metric of page length, not a particular spot on the bar itself.
- gambling8nt 17y ago
  I noticed that as well; I assume people basically all tended to check page length at the same point through the page--presumably at some boundary between content sections.

ahoyhere 17y ago

It's called "ad blindness," a well-known problem. That's why I don't even bother to put ads on my sites. People also ignore anything in colored blocks, or that looks like an ad. Thus ReCaptcha had a huge problem initially with people just "not seeing" it on the forms where it was placed. It looked like an ad.

elblanco 17y ago
I'd be interested in seeing similar research on Google's page, with their distinct take on ad selection, format and placement. It appears that people unconsciously set an "attention getting threshold", things that are designed to attract attention go above that threshold and are simply ignored. This seems to be well known hence the various forms of pop-up and pop-over ads that are showing up on sites again now even though they were proven to annoy users to the point of having to derive engineering solutions to the problem.